Southern Islands reportedly coming in November

According to Digitimes, AMD will announce the first products in its upcoming Southern Islands GPU series sometime in October. Shipments and retail availability are expected in November.

In addition, the red team will reportedly cut prices on select HD 5000 series cards to make way for new products. So far AMD has been less than keen to cut HD 5000 prices, as it’s still not facing much opposition from Nvidia.

This is in line with previous reports and roadmap leaks which indicated that AMD would indeed launch several new GPU’s before year’s end. However, it appears that this time around AMD will introduce entry level and mainstream parts first, while high end products should appear in early 2011. It's still a bit too early to know the details, so take this with a grain of salt.

Although the news comes as no surprise, it is nice to see AMD sticking to its schedules. Nvidia is also expected to introduce new GF106 and GF108 products over the next few weeks, but they will obviously face stiff opposition from upcoming AMD parts just a couple of months (or weeks) after they hit retail.